What the hell is Gelinaz anyway, and why is it shuffling?

Author: Pat Nourse
Photography: Rob Shaw

So what the hell is Gelinaz anyway, and why is it
shuffling?

Gelinaz is a loose affiliation of chefs brought together by
Lyon-based Italian food writer and impresario Andrea Petrini. Its
goal? It's not entirely clear. We think it's benign. The name
Gelinaz is a mash-up of the names of cult Tuscan chef Fulvio
Pierangelini and the Gorillaz, the rock super-group fronted by
animated fictional characters. It was conceived a decade ago in the
wake of a conversation about restaurant dishes and intellectual
property rights.

If that's suggestive of more than a little subversion and cheek,
it's useful to understand that Petrini, a man Time
magazine recently referred to as France's "culinary starmaker", is
something of a prankster. To the consternation of diners, he once
put together a dinner at Noma where a glittering roster of
international chefs all cooked variations on a single dish - and
sound-tracked it with an audio loop of a baby crying.

And the Grand Gelinaz Shuffle?

It's conceived in that same spirit of mischief and
boundary-pushing. The idea is that you plonk down hundreds of
dollars a ticket for dinner at one of the 40 restaurants Petrini
has invited to participate and take a leap of faith. You know that
your dinner will be cooked by one of the 40 chefs on the roster,
you just don't know which one.

Some of the most celebrated international names in contemporary
cooking are involved, so you might rock up to Orana in Adelaide,
Brae in country Victoria or Momofuku Seiobo in Sydney on Thursday
night to find your chef for the evening is Massimo Bottura from
Osteria Francescana, Alex Atala from DOM in Sao Paolo or Noma's
René Redzepi, while someone in Paris might find Paul Carmichael on
the pans at Le Chateaubriand, a diner in Slovenia might see Ben
Shewry on the pass in place of Ana Ros at Hiša Franko, while Dan
Hunter and Jock Zonfrillo could be doing their thing at Jimbocho
Den in Tokyo or Atelier Crenn in San Francisco.

So they just show up and cook?

Nothing so simple, gentle reader. The idea is that the chefs get
under the skin of the cities they're in - so much so that many of
them are living in the homes of their host chef - and come up with
something new, a product entirely of the Shuffle. And they're
encouraged to have a bit of fun with it.

At the first Shuffle, in July 2015, Nahm's David Thompson blew
the heads off Parisian diners at Plaza Athénée with caviar-spiked
betel leaves, while Mission Chinese Food chef Danny Bowien ditched
Noma's usual cool Scandinavian aesthetic and reinvented the
restaurant as a Cantonese function centre, replete with neon
lights, pink tablecloths, pleated napkins and bouquets of baby's
breath.

That's crackers. Has anyone in Australia gone for
it?

The dinners at Attica, Brae, Orana and Momofuku Seiobo have all
sold out.